Watching the clock

Israel’s remaining strategic options against Iran.

Participants sit at a table during talks on Iran.
(photo credit:REUTERS/Stanislav Filippov)

In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will
reverse.

– T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

One
wouldn’t think that a poem by T.S. Eliot could shed light on vital issues of
nuclear strategy, but some- times we may learn unexpectedly by inference. For
Israel, the still- impending nuclear dangers from Iran are rooted in chronology.
In the fashion of Eliot’s Prufrock, their core urgency lurks in the inherently
fickle judgments of time.

To act before it is too late, Israel’s leaders
must ask the right question. They must inquire, therefore, as follows: What,
exactly, do the decision-makers in Tehran value most? Is it Iran’s physical
survival? Or, rather, is it the advancement of certain fixed and immutable
religious goals? The correct answer to this core question is by no means
obvious. It is also essential to Israel’s success in creating (if it turns out
to be necessary) stable nuclear deterrence relations with the Islamic Republic
of Iran. In the absence of a correct answer, Israel could become subject, in the
future, to an Iranian nuclear attack. That is reality; that is the clock-driven
bottom line.

In the best of all possible worlds, Iran could still be
prevented from becoming a nuclear weapons state. Operationally, how- ever, the
current odds of undertaking a successful or cost-effective preemption against
Iran, an act of “anticipatory self-defense” in terms of international law, are
very low.

In all likelihood, Jerusalem will soon need to make appropriate
preparations for long- term coexistence with a new nuclear adversary. As part
of such more-or-less regrettable preparations, the chronically beleaguered
Jewish state will need to continue with its already impressive developments in
ballistic missile defense. Although Israel’s well-tested Arrow defense system
could never be adequately efficient for “soft-point” or city defense, it could
still play a major role in enhancing the nation’s indispensable nuclear
deterrent.

By forcing any conceivable attacker to constantly recalculate
the requirements of “assured destruction,” the Arrow system could make it
increasingly unrewarding for any attacker to strike first. In other words,
knowing that its capacity to assuredly destroy Israel’s nuclear retaliatory
forces with a first-strike attack could be lessened by incremental deployments
of the Arrow, Iran could decide that any such attack would necessarily be more
costly than gainful. This relatively optimistic conclusion is premised on the
antecedent assumption that Iran’s decisions will always be fully
rational.

What if such an assumption should not be warranted?
Irrationality is not the same as madness. Unlike a mad adversary, which would
have no discernible order of prefer- ences, an irrational Iranian leadership
might still maintain a distinct and entirely consis- tent hierarchy of
wants.

Although such an Iranian leadership might not be successfully
deterred by the more traditional threats of military destruction – because a
canonical Shi’ite eschatol- ogy could enthusiastically welcome “end times”
confrontations with “unbelievers” – it might still refrain from any attacks that
would expectedly harm its principal reli- gious values. An Iranian concern for
safe- guarding the “holy city” of Qom, for exam- ple, would be a good
example.

It is also reasonable to expect that an irrational Iranian
leadership would nonetheless value certain of its primary military institutions and could therefore still be deterred by certain compelling threats to
these institutions. A pertinent example would be the Iranian Revolutionary
Guard Corps, the power behind the Iranian dictatorship, the principal foe of the
Iranian people and the current leadership’s main instrument of
repression.

It could be productive for Jerusalem to hold at risk the
IRGC’s physical facilities, its terrorist training camps, its navy of small
attack boats, its missile program, the homes of its leaders and even its space
program.

Most civilian targets would be almost cer- tainly be excluded
from attack vulnerabili- ties, as would those particular military tar- gets that
were not identifiably IRGC-related.

Such a calculated exclusion would not
only be in Israel’s best overall strategic interests; it would also be necessary
to ensure routine Israeli compliance with the law of war, an exemplary adherence
to military rules that has long characterized the Israel Defense
Forces.

Such ethical adherence is well-known to every soldier of Israel
as “ tohar haneshek ” (purity of arms).

Conventional wisdom
notwithstanding, a nuclear Iran could still be very dangerous to Israel if its
leadership was able to meet the evident criteria of rationality. Miscalcula-
tions, or errors in information, for example, could lead even a fully rational
Iranian adversary to strike first. In these unstable cir- cumstances, moreover,
the very best anti- missile defenses would still prove inade- quate for
significant population protection.

AN ECCENTRIC argument can now be
added.

If Iran were presumed to be rational, in the usual sense of
valuing its national physical survival more highly than any other prefer- ence
or combination of preferences, Jerusalem could then begin to consider certain
benefits of pretended irrationality. Decades ago, Moshe Dayan warned: “Israel
must be seen as a mad dog; too dangerous to bother.” In this crude but effective
metaphor, Dayan already understood that it can sometimes be rational for states
to feign irrationality.

What if an Iranian adversary were pre- sumed to
be irrational in the sense of not caring most of all about its own national
survival? In this case, there would be no dis- cernible deterrence benefit to
Israel in assuming a posture of pretended irrationali- ty. The more probable
threat of a massive nuclear counterstrike by Israel would proba- bly be no more
persuasive in Tehran than if Iran’s self-declared enemy was presumed to be
totally rational.

“Do you know what it means to find yourself face to
face with a madman?” inquires Luigi Pirandello’s Henry IV. While this pithy
theatrical query does have some relevance to Jerusalem’s security concerns with
Iran, the mounting strategic chal- lenges from that country will be more apt to
come from decision-makers who are not mad and who are still rational. Soon,
there- fore, with this clarifying idea in mind, Israel will need to fashion a
more focused and formal strategic doctrine, one from which essential policies
and operations could always be suitably extrapolated.

This framework for
decision would identi- fy and correlate all available strategic options
(deterrence; preemption; active defense; strategic targeting; and nuclear war
fighting) with critical national survival goals. It would also take very close
account of possible interactions between these dis- crete, but sometimes
intersecting, strategic options.

Calculating these interactions will
present Israel with a computational task on the highest order of difficulty. In
some cases, it may even develop that the anticipated “whole” of
Iranian-inflicted harms could be greater than the technical sum of its discrete
“parts.” Recognizing this task as a preemi- nently intellectual (rather than
political) problem is the necessary first step for meet- ing Israel’s critical
survival goals.

On some matters, Israel has no real
choice.

Nuclear strategy is a game that sane and rational decision-makers
must play. But, to compete effectively, any would-be victor must always first
assess (1) the expected rationality of each opponent; and (2) the probable costs
and benefits of pretending irrationality oneself.

These are complex,
interpenetrating and glaringly imprecise forms of assessment.

They
represent vital judgments that will require (a) corollary refinements in both
intelligence and counter-intelligence; and (b) carefully calculated, selectively
partial and nuanced movements away from long- standing national policies of
deliberate nuclear ambiguity.

Soon, for Israel, it will no longer be
sensible to keep the “bomb in the basement.”

If Iran should manage to
join the nuclear club, which now seems likely, how will its leaders proceed to
rank their country’s most vital preferences? To answer this primary question
should now become the overriding security policy obligation in
Jerusalem.■ The writer is professor of political science and
international law at Purdue University. He is the author of many books and
articles dealing with nuclear strategy and nuclear war